A blog about how technology is transforming media

Google Orwellian

Google is powerful — and we all learned from Orwell that power corrupts. As to search, Google has near total power — will total power totally corrupt Google?

Ask BMW, whose SEO strategy violated Google’s “orthodoxy,” leading Google to unceremoniously excommunicate BMW’s German website from its “organic” search results. The BBC reported this action as a “death penalty.”

Google controls a huge percentage of the traffic flow on the Internet — and it has annoited itself judge, jury, and executioner for anyone who violates its “quality guidelines.” As Alexander Muse puts it:

No trial, no jury – just deathÃ¢â‚¬Â¦ Sorry guys!

It’s one thing for Google to tweak its algorithms to lower the search ranking of sites they perceive to be “gaming the system” (although even this is Big-Brotherish) — it’s quite another to summarily reduce a company’s page rank to zero.

You could argue that Google has searchers best interest in mind, but when you smell the stench of “orthodoxy,” you have to ask yourself — is Google’s unchecked power really serving its users well, or is it being blinded by its own definition of “right” and “wrong” in the struggle to get noticed online.

Alexander had a rather chilling update to his post:

Update: Brian IMÃ¢â‚¬â„¢d me that he was worried Google would zap our pagerank for writting this post. WOW! He was seriously concerned. Are you concerned too?

Is Publishing 2.0 at risk for this display of dissent? How far down the slippery slip does Google have to slide before they start Stalinistically stamping out dissent?

We might be inclined to trust Google’s technology — algorithms do what they are programmed to do — but can we trust the corruptible human intelligence behind those algorithms, which may be tempted to take their power to unfortunate extremes? Will history repeat itself in the politics of online information flow?

Matt Cutts, Google’s enforcer of search orthodoxy, turned off comments for his blog post on BMW — stamping out conversation — not a good omen.

UPDATE
Google has competitors, so their power is not “total.” BMW got what they deserved and won’t really suffer in the long run. Google had no choice but to crack down on BMW because they would have been damned if they didn’t. Google is trying to help sites from running afoul of their rules. Other search engines do what Google does. It’s implausible that Google would ever exercise any kind of overt retribution. And it’s not like Google is the Government. There are other things going on in the world that are truly “Orwellian.”

Valid points all. But somehow I find little consolation.

If you’re absolutely certain there isn’t — or could ever be — anything amiss here, then you should sleep well at night. I won’t try to keep you awake. Sweet dreams. Good night.

“We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of the farm depend on us. Day and night, we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples.”

UPDATE #2
Man, talk about “overheated rhetoric.” The opportunity to observe the spirited, even angry defense of Google is well worth the heat I’m taking for the conceit of this post. (And it was a conceit — it struck me as Orwellian, so I tried playing it out — I guess some thought experiments are inherently dangerous.)

BMW’s SEO was spam, and spam is evil, so Google’s actions are righteous, and how dare you suggest otherwise.

If it’s so wrong to suggest that there’s something creepy about all this, then dismiss it out of hand and move on — why take time out for all the righteous outrage?

The righteous defense of Google makes this all feel more Orwellian, not less.

Seriously, I’d love nothing more than to be wrong about this — I would sleep better at night. But I’m not about to start trusting Google unquestioningly.

When a company’s mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” that’s aspiring to truly awesome power. And the notion that the market will immediately spot and punish any abuses of that power still strikes me as a bit too optimistic.